Tiny Slice, Big Market

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Tiny Slice, Big Market

Like many tech-savvy professionals, Howard Chui was fascinated by his first mobile phone, which he acquired in 2000. He plumbed every menu on his Sony Clearnet PCS handset, looking for hidden capabilities. His interest developed into obsession when he graduated to a Nokia 5190 in 2002. The Canadian sysadmin started sharing ringtones and backgrounds with friends and then writing about his passion at (where else?) www.howardchui.com. Chui fielded questions from readers, but he soon found himself inundated. "I figured it would be useful if people asked questions on a forum," he says, "so everyone could benefit from the answers." HowardForums was born.

HowardForums.com hosts discussions devoted to niches within a niche. Conversations are broken down by carrier and manufacturer – Cingular, Motorola, Nokia, and so on. Within those sections are subsections on subjects like troubleshooting and modding, and within those are threads on specific topics like Rokr firmware and Verizon's customer service. How many people could possibly be interested in content with such pinpoint focus? A very large number, as it happens. A post on the new Motorola SLVR has racked up about 250,000 pageviews in less than a year. The site served more than 250 million pageviews in 2005, and it's on track to break 300 million in 2006. In short, Chui has discovered a meganiche.

I define a meganiche as a thin slice of the Web that nonetheless represents roughly a million users. The meganiche is something new, and it will have a lasting impact on online business and culture.

For most of the past decade, the basic strategy for building a successful Web site was encapsulated in the phrase "Get big, get niche, or get out." You could appeal to a broad constituency, with all the blandness and generality that implies (think Yahoo), or you could target a tightly focused group that was far smaller but easier to reach and more loyal than a mass audience (think Slashdot). Getting big would yield high volume and low margins, while getting niche would bring the inverse. Getting out was what you were forced to do if you ended up stuck somewhere between the other two approaches.

That was when 36 million people were online. Now that more than a billion people have access to the Web, there is no longer a trade-off between size and specificity. The basic math is simple: A tiny piece of an immense pie is huge. A decade ago, reaching one-tenth of 1 percent of Web users amounted to 36,000 people, a number that compared favorably with the circulation of, say, the daily newspaper in Bridgewater, New Jersey. Back then, reaching a million users required a decidedly mainstream offering (Amazon.com and MSN come to mind). Now, getting niche can be the path to getting big; one-tenth of 1 percent of today's Web audience is a million people. Forget Bridgewater – the Net is chockablock with special-interest sites and services you've never heard of but whose user base exceeds the print circulation of The Washington Post.

HowardForums.com has a full-time staff of two – Chui and his wife – and 40 volunteer moderators. Revenue, which Chui declines to reveal, comes from several forms of advertising: banners, Google ads, and certain threads that operate as commercial marketplaces. As for marketing the site, it's all word of mouth. "People in the [cell phone] business refer their own customers to the forums when they can't answer a question," Chui says.

Cell users hardly constitute a niche market – after all, mobile penetration in the US, Europe, and Asia averages nearly 70 percent. But a small portion of cell users, it turns out, want to get more deeply into their phones than manufacturers are accustomed to – they want to enable Bluetooth file-sharing or reprogram the firmware. Users don't come to HowardForums.com because it can answer every question. They come because they can get answers to every question on a particular, narrow subject.

Meganiche sites are often based on a mainstream topic, but they carve it into divisions that the market as a whole may barely recognize. Gaia Online, for instance, is a community of anime fans – but not just any anime fans. It appeals to those who want not only to watch Japanese animation but to share their enthusiasm and creativity in ways that broadcast media doesn't allow.

Gaia's cartoon-laden pages suggest a cross between a bulletin board and a massively multiplayer online role-playing game. Users make their own wide-eyed avatars to take part in forums, guilds, and games and to share original artwork and stories. Founded in 2003, the site began as a list of links. Today it has more than 4 million registered users. At any given moment, thousands of fans are uploading original hand-drawn images (the site holds 100,000 and counting), sharing fan fiction (hundreds of original stories are posted each month), chatting (700 million messages), and exchanging in-world items for Gaia gold (purchased through a secondary market on eBay, natch).

If you haven't heard of Gaia, there are good reasons. Despite its size, the site has limited appeal. Anime role-playing and tutorials on how to sketch girls with really big eyes don't hold much interest for, oh, 99.9 percent of the Web's population. The remaining 0.1 percent, though, is the kind of audience VC-backed sites spent millions to court – and mostly failed to capture – during the dotcom boom. Gaia can amass a large, committed audience at little cost because it doesn't try to be all things to all people. As a result, the site doesn't need to advertise to the general public to reach its audience.

Another reason you may not have heard of Gaia is that media culture hasn't caught up to media itself. People often still assume that TV shows are more popular than Web sites. This was true in the early days of the Web, when the sheer brand power of a traditional network, studio, or print outlet could pull a bigger crowd than an online upstart. But as the Web has matured, it has begun to draw its own audiences, and they can be sizable. Gaia attracted nearly a million unique users in August 2006, according to Media Metrix's comScore service – on par with the numbers for the mass-market sites RollingStone.com and MaximOnline.com. Counting pageviews makes for a more dramatic comparison. Gaia's monthly pageviews per user (25.7 per visit) beat not just RollingStone.com (2.9) but MSNBC.com (1.8) and Oprah.com (6.9), according to Amazon's Alexa service. If you get the niche right, the audience is not only large and inexpensive but active and loyal as well.

As bewildering as Gaia may be to those who aren't captivated by spike-haired cartoon characters, at least its niche is recognizable. Anime fans with an inclination to invest their personality in a customized avatar, and the spare time to create stories and artwork, are at least a definable demographic group. But the meganiche phenomenon isn't confined to vertical categories like type-A cell phone owners and rabid anime fans. Meganiches can address any interest, even one that users themselves wouldn't have thought of until they stumbled across a captivating Web page.

Consider YTMND.com. The letters stand for "You're the man now, dog," a Sean Connery line from the formulaic feel-good flick Finding Forrester, released in 2000. Amused by the notion of a septuagenarian Scotsman using ghetto slang, Max Goldberg, then a 19-year-old programmer, created a Web page celebrating the line and posted it at www.yourethemannowdog.com. The layout was as simple as it was nonsensical: a still from the movie overlaid with a 3-D font treatment of the phrase, which Goldberg soon gilded with an audioclip of the actor's declamation. It was just a stupid jab at a stupid movie, but it caught on.

"One day I checked my stats and saw the site was getting a few thousand people a day," Goldberg recalls. "I was amazed. Then a few friends took the HTML code for www.yourethemannowdog.com and changed the text, image, and sound to make something similar but new." In effect, Goldberg had accidentally invented a new online art form flexible enough to inspire people whose sole commonality was a sense of the absurd. "That's when I decided to create YTMND.com."

YTMND.com now hosts thousands of user-created Web pages, known as YTMNDs, that combine a background image, a sound clip, and rudimentary animation. The effect is often comic but frequently inexplicable, the ultimate inside joke. You might not think an animated hand drawing breasts on a comic-book heroine to a snippet of A-Ha's "Take On Me" is much of a knee slapper, but a surprising number of people can't get enough – which, of course, is the very definition of a meganiche.

YTMND.com gets millions of unique visitors a month, more than 100,000 of whom have contributed YTMNDs. Supported entirely by Google ads, Goldberg does all the system administration but mainly tries to stay out of the way. "The site sort of runs itself," he says. His success illustrates an unexpected dimension of the meganiche's power: What begins as an isolated sarcastic gesture can become the world's biggest inside joke.

I first encountered the meganiche concept by chance: I was examining the top few thousand sites listed by Alexa. Once I had culled the well-known media outlets, famous brands, Web marketing firms, and porn venues, I was left with an unfamiliar, difficult-to-characterize residue. There were focused communities (HowardForums and Gaia, plus sites like CollarMe, LifeTips, and SwapperNet), silly diversions (Consumption Junction, Funny Junk, I-Am-Bored.com, Shoosh Time), narrow commercial offerings (NextPimp, YachtWorld), and creative forums (4Chan, FanFiction.net, and YTMND.com).

Many of these sites are unconventional in their approach, content, and design, but all garner substantial traffic. And traffic means potential revenue, which makes the meganiche a good business bet as well as a cultural phenomenon. User-generated content is the Web-biz buzzword of the day, and meganiche sites tend to produce lots of it. These sites manufacture huge amounts of new online real estate – perfect for cheap, automated ads. What drives revenue isn't the quality of the content but the volume of pages.

Not long ago, advertisers shied away from user-generated pages. A banner on Tripod's homepage was OK, but no self-respecting advertiser would risk putting his shiny brand next to chat or fan fiction, much less snapshots of a college freshman barfing at his first beer bash. But that's changing. Google's AdSense program brought to the Web a less brand-conscious style of advertising and a pool of advertisers who don't view the online environment as an extension of print, with its concerns about the way an ad might clash with an editorial page. Suddenly a site that depends on user contributions can have a business model.

Given the appealing characteristics of meganiche sites – cheap to build and run, attractive to a large, loyal user base – it's tempting to think they might trigger the next online gold rush. However, the days of million-user sites built on a whim may already be over. Gaia, HowardForums, and YTMND all launched at least a few years ago. They began as hobbies, starting out niche and growing mega over time. Unfortunately for anyone hoping to replicate this strategy, the competitive landscape has evolved since then. The arrival of advertising money increases the incentive to create such sites by design rather than let them evolve. (Exhibit A: MySpace.) Furthermore, the Internet's hyperinflationary era is over. The online population grew by two orders of magnitude in the last decade; during that time, a site that held its own against competitors could see its audience multiply automatically. But at a billion or so users, the Net won't grow another order of magnitude, ever. Future HowardForums and Gaias will gain new members only by diverting their attention from other sites.

However the competitive pressures play out, meganiches will be a permanent part of the landscape. Between the one-size-fits-all Wikipedia and the West Iceland Tourist Guide, thousands of sites will serve audiences numbering in the hundreds of thousands or millions. The mainstream will still exist, but it will be joined by innumerable meganiches, each a reflection of the often baffling diversity of human interests and tastes – and a reminder that even the most idiosyncratic Netizen can share an in-joke with his million best friends.

Contributing editor Clay Shirky (clay@shirky.com) teaches in the Interactive Telecommunications program at NYU. He wrote about the Web's social pecking order in issue 12.08.credit Christian Northeast